xp_logs | Jay & Paige midday

Jay passes time in Paige's lab, while she does her usual studies. Both Guthries are hiding out. Some sibling comfort assures them there are things that can still be normal.

He leaned over the table, situated in a chair with wheels, staring down at the faint blues lines on the blank piece of paper and rolled through morbid words that came natural but should have been foreign. The pen bounced off his thigh, consistent in its tapping while the nails of his fingers dug into the underside of the chair’s seat. He shifted, straightening in posture and pivoted, returning his gaze to his original interest. The tapping of the pen stopped.

“I’m sure this is one of those insensitive things to say to your sibling recovering from a major trauma, but you’re creeping me out,” Paige said after a beat, still peering down into her microscope. “I mean, I can feel you looking at me. You’re still doing it. Don’t make me get out the stick of science again. Or worse, I’ll boot up the stress test program. Take your blood pressure.”

“Ah’m just sitting here,” he said, turning the chair back in its previous position. He looked down at the sheet again and his shoulders sagged in defeat. “Ah can’t think of anything.” He didn’t mention that she was so much more interesting to watch, to obsessive and broaden over. He didn’t mention that his sister was the focal point of his entire consciousness.

Paige sighed and straightened her spine, her pupils adjusting as she picked up her pencil, making a few ticks in various columns. “You write country songs. How hard could it be? Truck, dead dog, some fields and a sunset. There, I just wrote it for you, fill in the bits.”
“Dead dog? Gimmie a break,” Jay rolled his head, rolling his shoulders afterwards. “You could not write a decent country song it yer life depended on it.” Jay stood up, abandoning Paige’s project that she had set in front of him. “What’s the point of writing a song if Ah can’t sing it?”

“Luckily, it doesn’t. I have a very content life marking microbe development. Curing cancer. Being awesome,” she said, looking at him fondly over her shoulder. “Besides, you have to deal, right? Get it out. Some people take a run. Rant over coffee. Destroy your liver. You write songs. So write a song. It’s going to be hard, whatever, and then you suck it up and keep going. And stop staring at me. You have the darty eye thing going on.”

“Ah do not,” he said, walking over to a nearby table and studying a set of test tubes on a rack. “You wouldn’t just do whatever ya have to do and deal with it. What if ya couldn’t deal with it huh? What if you were so mangled, ya couldn’t put together what you were and what ya are now?”

Paige tsked quietly, returning the slide under the microscope to its container and walking to the small ‘fridge. “How soon you forget little one,” she answered quietly, squeezing his shoulder as she walked past again, with another slide. “You will. It doesn’t seem like now and it seems endless and without a way out. But we’re fucking Guthries. We survive.”
She grinned widely at him, a skinny blonde girl in a lab coat. “And if you don’t, I throw you in isolation!”

Jay laughed, bitterly that surfaced a slight keen in an unnatural way. “It don’t seem endless. It just don’t seem like anything,” he shrugged nonchalantly. “Ya had a mental break down already. This ain’t that.”

“Are you sure? Isolation. Good times. Who doesn’t love a big concrete box!” Sliding into her stool, Paige spun around several times, whitewhitebluewhitewhitewhiteblue. “I don’t have the answer, kiddo. If that’s what you’re looking for. I’m sorry, but unless there’s an equation involved, I’m not on my game. But I’ll be there for you, no matter what.”

“Yeah, cause that’s what Ah’m waitin’ to hear for. That you’ll be here and Ah’m gonna be there, some lil’ fucked up project that don’t give ya all the answers ya wanna have. C’mon Paige, look at me. This ain’t some sorta dilemma. Ah can’t function like ah could. You can’t be there. No one can.” Shut him down and walk away, he was waiting for that.

“Oh, shut up. You giant girl. I’m saying that you’re going to have to figure this out for yourself but you know what? You have people that will support you. Even though you’re a giant girl. You must be something awesome if I’m not going into the deep freeze and chunking the bubonic plague at you.” Paige put a fist on her hip, pursing her mouth at him. “Don’t shut down on me. Please?”

“Do ya even know what support even means? It means sitting there and shuttin’ up. That’s what it means. Ya think Garrison or Dani wants to hear, ‘oh we’re here for ya, here, have some ice-cream cause it’ll make it all better’. Where’s mah spoon?” he said, throwing a set of test tubes towards the wall. “Where’s mah recover?” Jay scowled, throwing another set against the wall.

There was a long pause, until Paige sighed, climbing off her stool and coming over to gently lean on him, her head resting against his. “Okay.”

Hesitating, he glanced down at her, a double chin forming while he considered her one admission. Reluctantly, his cheek touched her head and the tension sapped from his shoulders, down to an unseen force. “You scare me sometimes.”